BPM simulation of transverse mode characteristics in surface emitting laser

Abstract

A vertical cavity surface emitting (SE) laser is becoming one of important devices for parallel optical processing and optical disk memories, because of its narrow circular beam, longitudinal single mode operation and two-dimensional parallelism. For these applications, the transverse mode must be well stabilized and some discussion has been made by approximation analysis.1 This approach, however, can not be applicable to the analysis for obtaining characteristics such as side mode suppression ratio and the maximum output power under single transverse mode operation. There may be influenced by the spatial change of refractive index and gain in an active medium by carrier variation. The advantage of using a beam propagation method (BPM)2 is to propagate the beam in the medium which has both refractive index and gain distributions. We, therefore, have employed a three-dimensional BPM and simulated the metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) grown circular buried heterostructure (CBH) SE laser.3 In order to perform this simulation, we use the supercomputer ETA10 and automatic vectorization of this system.